


Window on the World

by orphan_account



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, M/M, Modern AU, Multi, and trans guy enj, this is just a whole bunch of angst ok, trans guy R
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:06:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Drinking gin is like drinking pine tree sap, but Grantaire wants so badly to hold someone right now, to crush them against his chest, to be told that he is loved by anyone at all, or at least that he is not hated—and this, of course, is equal parts absurd, embarrassing, and impossible, so he makes do with what he has.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from a song called "moth and worm" by the mountain goats, which i can't find online, but which is fucking heartbreaking and beautiful--if i find a public link to it later on i'll post it

_Grantaire, put the bottle down._

He pulls his beanie over the mess of his hair, already too hot in the soft fabric of his sweatshirt with some several unmeasured gulps of Fireball in his belly. His brain’s a big mess of want and fear and indecision at the moment, and he wonders whether he should put on a second layer of deodorant. He tugs at his curls. Fuckin mess. He’s flushed in the mirror, red with the memory of Enjolras’ words, aching—the meeting, the Musain, the question of his flask, Enjolras’ eyes, his stupid _hair_ —

Chetta’s going to bring him that usual first glass of wine without question, and he’ll take it because of course he will, and it’ll be gone before three minutes are up, and then he’ll order another because he’s not going to just _sit_ there, not when everyone around is enjoying themselves, not with the smell of alcohol in the air sending the little Party Goblin in his head into a frenzy like a shark smelling blood; and then, when he’s two deep, he’ll say _fuck it_ and start in on Chetta’s absinthe concoctions, and then he’ll become the distraction he is and it’ll happen again: _Grantaire, put the bottle down._

His cheeks go absolutely crimson in the mirror. He turns away from his reflection.

Alright. Alright, that’s it then. He won’t drink at all, then, tonight. Not while he’s there. Not in front of the others, in front of Enjolras. And if he just doesn’t start—if he stops before he leaves home, at least—if he can slip under the radar—he’ll have to insure he’s not _wanting_ so much—

He snatches the Fireball off the counter on the sink and unscrews it again, puts the mouth to _his_ mouth and takes three long, determined gulps. He shuts his eyes as he puts the cap back on (that familiar sound of metal on glass) feeling his stomach light up, the warmth crawling up his chest.

He avoids the mirror on his way out, swinging his bag over his shoulder; locks the door, pockets his key, gets a new pack of cigarettes out of his pocket in the hallway, puts an earbud in—

\---

“What’re you having, R?”

Bahorel smells like Old Spice, but his gym bag, as he drops it under the table, lets out a rancid puff of air. Grantaire takes his eyes from his sketchbook and lounges back in his chair, pencil in hand. They’re early, the two of them, although Ferre and Courf are hunched over at another table, poring over some article on Courf’s phone.

Grantaire inclines his chin at his glass.

“Coke,” he says.

Bahorel gives a little laugh like he’s not sure if he’s joking or not, and when Grantaire doesn’t say anything else, he just raps the table with his knuckles and says, “Going up to Chetta if you want something else.”

“Mm,” says Grantaire returning to his sketch. “Nah. Thanks.”

“Alright, dude.”

It takes Bahorel a moment to leave. Grantaire’s pencil traces aimlessly over the page.

\---

He calls it his Party Goblin because he heard that phrase in a comedy special somewhere and that means it’s funny, right?

The Party Goblin turns its head like a hound dog scenting a rabbit when Joly and Bossuet show up with a glass of red wine each, having stopped by the bar on their way in. Joly sets his down on the table as he takes off his scarf.

“Cold out there!” he exclaims. “Please tell me your coat’s in your bag, R.”

“I think I left my coat at Courf’s last week,” Grantaire says without looking up from the tree that he’s doodling.

Joly squawks.

“Leave him be, darling,” Bossuet intercedes, laughing, before Joly can get some choice words out. “R’s a polar bear. Remember that time he walked home barefoot all the way through the snow and then called us when he got home? ‘I think I left my shoes in your flat….’”

“I wasn’t quite in my right mind at the time.”

“You were completely hammered,” agrees Bossuet, genially.

“You know, hypothermia kills at least seven-hundred people a year—” Joly starts.

“Bahorel sitting there?”

“Yeah.”

“He was telling us about his workout up at the bar. Has he told you? He does one-hundred burpees with the medicine ball _every day_ ,” says Joly. “I only wish.”

“You do _not_ wish,” Bossuet says. “I see you. You’re content sitting around the TV eating those veggie straw chips every night—”

“I think Bahorel was trying to impress Chetta, though,” says Joly.

Bossuet considers this. He sighs.

“Who _wouldn’t_ be trying to impress Chetta?”

“I know.”

“She has the thickest hair I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Joly, wistfully. “She must really get her vitamins.”

“I’ll bet _she_ could do one-hundred burpees with a medicine ball. Her thighs could crush a man’s skull—”

“Maybe she’d show you. It might be easier if said man’s skull happened to bear a distinct resemblance to an egg,” Grantaire remarks, indicating the gleam coming off Bossuet’s bald scalp with a tilt of his eraser.

Joly just about falls off his seat laughing; Bossuet snatches Grantaire’s pencil and mimes stabbing himself in the heart with it.

“Speaking of such,” he says, handing it back, “how are you doing with…?” Bossuet makes a suggestive noise, rolling his eyes behind himself to indicate the front of the room.

“Ah,” says Grantaire. He picks up his Coke instinctually and takes a sip. The Party Goblin rages against the sweet, sticky stuff in his mouth. “Well, after last week…”

They seem to be waiting for the end of that sentence, but he hasn’t got one.

“…yes?” asks Joly.

“That’s it,” says Grantaire. “You saw.”

“What? You were being your usual punkass self and Enjolras yelled at you? That happens every week.”

 _No,_ Grantaire wants to say, _no, this time it was different. Didn’t you see?_

But instead he just grins.

“And what more is there to say?” he asks.

\---

He almost makes it; he really does.

Enjolras is talking about their campaign for the homeless shelter on Fifth.

“—their program for homeless vets: finding them jobs, getting them clothes for the interviews, making sure they’re clean, setting them up with—”

“What kind of clean?” Grantaire hears his own voice ask.

“—transportation. What do you mean, Grantaire?”

“I mean, showers or drugs?”

Enjolras looks at him from over the tops of his reading glasses.

“Well, there are bathroom facilities onsite,” he says, “including showers. But I meant it in the sense of alcohol and drug use.”

Grantaire sets down his pencil and leans back in his chair.

“And what happens if they are using?”

“Well,” says Enjolras, “I mean, ideally, they won’t be.”

“Right, but these are homeless veterans, Einstein; what do you think most of them are doing with their precious time? Reminiscing about the good ol’ days in the war and scouring Pinterest for inventive ways to transform items off the Burger Kind dollar menu?”

“No, but if they’re not ready to turn their lives around, they likely aren’t ready to re-enter the workplace—”

“So addicts deserve to live on the streets, is what you’re saying.”

“That is absolutely _not_ what I’m saying. I saying—”

“How do the workers tell whether the applicants are clean or not?”

“What?”

“How,” Grantaire repeats, “do the workers tell whether the applicants are clean or not?”

“They test them.”

“And if they show up positive, they deny them access to the program.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re not ready—because they want healthy applicants who have an actual chance at their interviews!”

“And no addict could possibly be capable of holding down a job.”

“Likely not while they’re using, no!”

“Alright, alright,” says Combeferre, laying a hand on Enjolras’ elbow and shooting a warning glance at Grantaire. “That’s enough time spent on this particular issue. Regardless, the funds of our campaigns this month are going to go toward helping the shelter pay off its mortgage…”

Combeferre segues effortlessly into his presentation of the monthly budget, leaving Enjolras to stalk back to his seat beside Courfeyrac. Grantaire broods, coloring the leaves of his sad little willow.

When Bossuet pushes back his chair a few minutes later and whispers to the table, “Bar. Want anything?” the Party Goblin cackles.

“I’ll come with you,” R says.

\---

By the time the meeting draws to a close, he’s five or six beers deep and desperately has to pee.

He clutches Bahorel’s shoulder to rise and makes his way to the bathroom.

In the yellowed mirror, he looks at his droopy eyes and wonders if it’s possible, in a literal sense, to claw one’s own heart out of one’s own chest.

\---

He stays low, low, low the rest of the weekend.

Saturday morning, he wakes fully clothed before the light is up, not remembering how he got back to his apartment, back to his mattress on the living room floor—and he rolls out and he stumbles off to the bathroom to piss. He’s left the bottle of Fireball stashed gracelessly behind the toilet brush—when? why?—his mouth tastes like vomit—that’s probably why. He picks it up while he sits on the toilet seat and finishes off the few mouthfuls that are left at the bottom. It tastes disgusting.

He goes back to bed. He doesn’t sleep. He looks over the countertop into the kitchen. Why the fuck does he leave everything out like this? His dishes are washed, dried, and put away, for once. His drying towel hangs neatly over the oven door. The mat is flat under the sink. The chairs are pushed in. But there’s still two bottles of flavored vodka in the counter, a collection of wine bottles nested up on top of the refrigerator, a bottle of absinthe in the center of the table like a decoration--

He gets up without any real intention, maybe to pick them up, to put them away, but instead he hovers around for a moment until he opens the refrigerator, gets out some dubiously-dated orange juice, gets a glass, and then proceeds makes himself the world’s strongest screwdriver.

Another day begins.

\---

There’s some stupid study about rats and two bowls of water, one bowl laced with opiates: a pack of rats together in a cage will stick to the control water. A single rat will choose the opiates over and over until it dies.

Grantaire found this fascinating until he offhandedly mentioned it to Jehan.

“Well, yeah. Duh.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, ‘Duh.’ Sounds like a totally self-evident study,” Jehan said. “Loneliness does shitty things to people.”

“I don’t know. I like to be alone.”

“That’s different.”

“How is that different?”

“Loneliness is different than, like, alone-ness. You can still be lonely when you’re not alone.”

“Aw, that’s just pedanticism. And, anyway, it’s unrelated—you know, if it was different, the rats in a pack wouldn’t choose the clean water.”

“People have different needs than rats.”

“Not very.”

Jehan looked him up and down.

“Uh, _yes_ ,” they tell him. “Very.”

\---

“Hey, set-girl, you okay?”

Grantaire’s been sitting still for five minutes, running his finger around and around the inner lip of an open bucket of paint. Sky blue. The emptiest and saddest color he can think of. It’s gone bad, and whitish chunks float in the layer of grease collected at the top.

Grantaire visibly starts. His eyes come back gradually into focus.

The actor playing Conrad Birdie is standing there, looking bewildered.

“Yeah,” says Grantaire, recovering his grace with a little laugh. He wipes paint off his finger onto his jeans. “Just spaced out for a minute there.”

Conrad Birdie knocks on the wall, smiling again, and heads on through the opposite door in the direction of stage right.

“Gotta love tech week,” he says.

“Fuck yeah,” R calls after him.

R looks back at the paint. It’s too old to be salvaged.

He turns and pours the whole thing into the fifty-gallon tub of kitty litter and other unwanted paints that’s drying in the corner. It’ll be tossed into the dumpster out back later, a sticky, smelly mass of bright, bright colors.

\---

He kills two bottles of rosé and winds up at Eponine’s door again.

“I need you,” he whines at her, laying his head on the doorframe.

She brings him inside and puts him on her couch, and he watches as she spoons coffee grounds into the filter. He pushes his fists into his teeth, leaving bite marks, listening to the gurgle of the machine and Eponine’s plastic-bottomed slippers click-clicking over the tile.

And then she’s sitting on the coffee table, facing him.

“Take your sweatshirt off,” she says.

“I’m cold.”

It’s true. He’s shivering, shaking all over. She sighs.

“My shirt’s not coming off either, then.”

“I don’t care.”

Though he doesn’t see what she has to worry about. She’s all angles, her hipbones like masts on twin ships, her breasts small and pink and tender. His own are squashed by years of ace bandages so that they’re nearly a part of his belly, and it’s not like his belly _needs_ any help. He shifts uncomfortably, thinking about it, suddenly very aware of the way it rests in his lap as he’s sitting here in front of Eponine, talking about taking off his sweatshirt. His eyes slip shut.

“Come over here,” he says.

And he feels her get up and settle down again beside him, wedging her face into the gap between his shoulder and the couch, her hand sliding down, her thumb rubbing a small circle on his thigh. Grantaire exhales, shakily.

 

When she breaks, later on, she says another name. It only makes him feel a little bit less guilty.

\---

He’s on a mission, some days, to explore the feeling as deep as it goes.

He gets up. He makes black coffee. He goes to work without a flask. He paints the sets. He rigs the wires. He doesn’t hum, doesn’t talk to the actors, does his work. At lunch, he sits in the back, in the corner, eats his sandwich, scrolls through his phone, scratches the back of his neck red and raw. By the time the evening rolls around, he’s twitchy as a rabbit in a makeup lab, hiding in the bathroom when he can, fixing things that don’t need to be fixed when he can’t.

On these days, he will go home and crash out on his mattress the moment he can. And then he will sleep like the dead or the dying until morning inevitably, unforgivingly comes again.


	2. Chapter 2

It goes on. On so that it’s not even worth words at a point, because one day might as well be the next, and if the hours started taping over themselves like so many interchangeable episodes of Wheel of Fortune and infomercials, no one would be any the wiser. Sometimes it gets like that. Sometimes he tries to tell, but it seems like all that comes out of his throat is a series of jumbled-up gibberish syllables and somehow, miraculously, like they’ve understood where they couldn’t possibly, because no one understands one another, because feelings aren’t tangible, they aren’t visual, and it hurts, _hurts_ —somehow people will say, “Been there, dude,” and nod and laugh a little, and somehow that’s even worse. Like they get it. Like they’re in here with him. Like bells on cat’s collars can tell you the time the way that cricket’s wings can tell you the temperature, like how wind chill doesn’t really affect the way water freezes—

“—definitely drunk—”

The actress with the blue cornrows is whispering to the girl who plays Rosie while she nods, eyes sharpened, mouth smiling. Both of their gazes skid away from Grantaire when he looks over.

He ducks off to hide his ass behind the nearest flimsy pinewood set, pretending to inspect its hinges, balling the fabric of his sweater in his palm. It’s not their faults. It’s not their faults: they’re right, first of all, and it isn’t like Grantaire’s never giggled over Montparnasse’s shitty love poems with Jehan, or the short and stout Neanderthal of a man who thinks he owns the weight room at the gym with Bahorel before. It’s something everybody does; it means nothing. It means nothing.

The hinges, in fact, could be tightened. He goes off to get a Phillip’s head.

It goes on. Moments stick out, markers that moving is happening, albeit without movement, trudged along some flat dun plane. The weather turns brown, and then grey, and he shows up at the Musain with it all down the front of his sweatshirt one night.

“What happened to you?” Bossuet laughs, stretching out a hand to brush the snow from R’s chest before thinking the better of it and drawing back.

Grantaire stumbles against the counter, a moment too late if Bossuet’s hand had continued. He laughs.

“Fell,” he says. A moment too late.

Later that night—or maybe it’s not that night, because who knows anymore—he tries to order a SoCo Sour, which is hardly even a real drink, and Musichetta says, “No, honey, that’s enough, okay? I’m gonna bring you some food instead.”

He looks at her, no fight in him, and nods. He thinks he thanks her, tells her none of those salt and vinegar chips this time, please, before he lays his head down on the table and shuts his eyes.

Enjolras’ voice goes on. It washes over him like gentle fingers on the nape of his neck: clear and cold and enunciated, stuck probably forever somewhere between the registers of a foreign teenage girl’s and the rasp of HRT. It’s a gorgeous voice, one that might be called rough if it belonged to someone other than Enjolras, who is all crisp bowties and glass water bottles and color-coded folders.

“—the mental health facilities at the university, whose options for care are sadly lacking. Calling the crisis hotline will put the caller in touch with a psychology undergrad who will have little to no experience, who can really do nothing other than direct the call to 9-1-1 if it is a true crisis—”

Musichetta lays her warm hand on Grantaire’s shoulder and says something into his ear. There’s a plate of French fries in front of him. He nods to her and picks one up, carefully; he takes a bite. The Party Goblin growls.

“—ask whether there ought to be a hotline at all, if this is the case. Someone who calls the hotline in a time of crisis—which is, ostensibly, for what the hotline exists—will merely be redirected. And this is to gloss over the fact that the majority of callers will be mentally ill people, who are oftentimes not only uncomfortable speaking over the phone in the first place, but who also might have difficulty discussing a crisis frankly, and may downplay their situation in efforts not to embarrass themselves, particularly if the person to answer their call sounds to be the same age as them. The age of the volunteer sounds almost like too small a problem to mention, but studies show that it does impact the—”

Grantaire pushes his chair back and slides out, the greasy fries curdling in his stomach as he stands. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt and walks, head down, from the room. He passes the bar on the way out and catches Musichetta’s mouth opening from the corner of his eye.

“Cigarette,” he assures her, holding up his pack of Winstons. She eyes him, nods, and then makes the ‘I’m watching you’ motion.

The wooden door is sturdy, and sucks all the raucous sound from indoors with it as it swings shut. He’s left with the whistling of the wind through the fake gaslights that hang from either side of the sign reading “MUSAIN,” his feet carrying him to the left, where he steps directly into a knee-high drift.

It doesn’t get much better. He bends to brush snow off the leg of his holey old jeans, and his pack falls out of his pocket to the sidewalk, soaking half the smokes in there. And then his lighter gets lost, only to turn up in his hand somehow—and then, once he’s gotten everything all figured out (a cigarette between his lips, his hands cupped, mouth dry), his fingers are so numb he can’t get the fucking thing lit.

The door swirls open, laughter pouring out for a moment. Grantaire doesn’t pay much attention, still flicking at the stupid gear on his lighter, leaning against the wall, until a familiar voice says, “Here,” and a light appears.

He’s so surprised that he coughs instead of sucks in, and nearly burns his hand on the new light.

“Jesus,” says Enjolras. “Put yours down. Come here.”

He does as instructed. Wide eyes, two puffs—the cigarette is lit, and Enjolras is pulling out one of his own, no longer looking anywhere near Grantaire.

“You hipster motherfucker,” says Grantaire’s mouth before he can stop it, his hand indicating the American Spirits Enjolras has pulled out. Enjolras just cocks an eyebrow at him and lights one, cheekbones flickering orange for a moment, soft pink lips all puckered up—and it’s on the few occasions like this that Grantaire’s glad he doesn’t have a dick. As it is, he wonders how pissed Chetta would be if he swooned down right here in the snow.

Instead he says, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

Enjolras says, “I don’t.”

Grantaire’s unconvinced eyes follow as Enjolras glares down at the snow and takes a long drag.

“I quit,” he admits on the exhale. His jaw is twitching. “But… you know. It’s finals season, and… Well, what’s it to you anyway? Leave me alone.”

“Woah, woah,” Grantaire laughs, holding up his hands. He pulls in on his own cigarette, highlighting it with big waves of his hands. “No one’s judging here.”

Enjolras looks so damn good with his fingers up by his face like that, the muscles in his throat loosening up now. He sucks on his teeth.

“Don’t tell Ferre,” he says.

“Mm,” says Grantaire. “Deal.”

And he moves to shake on it but Enjolras ignores him.

The smoke in silence for a while after that, watching flurries whip past outside the overhang. On the other side of the street is a flower shop with its windows darkened but its heart still glowing yellow where the orchids sleep, bouquets with their bodies pushed up against the window, wrapped in crinkly plastic. It looks like a good, safe place. Grantaire’s sweatshirt has holes in it. He wants to go back inside the Musain where it’s warm and where he can hear Enjolras’ voice, and he wants to drink until his body is gone and he’s just a pair of invisible eyes in the middle of a room filled with a group of friends.

He lights another cigarette with the end of his first.

“My parents are really Catholic,” he says, for some reason, “and when I was little, I one-hundred-percent believed that God picked the weather, and so I’d always try to get Him to swing it in my favor, you know—I thought if I prayed hard enough and well enough and with good enough intentions, I could make it snow and get school off the next day—and when it never worked, I just thought that I was being too… proud? Too ballsy, you know, thinking that I personally could persuade God to make it snow, and that God must have been pissed off that I had the gumption to ask for special favors like that, because He probably had other, better reasons besides me for making it snow—or, not snow, as the case warranted. Or even that it was wrong of me to ask because it was too provable, you know? Like that story in the Bible where the Devil tries to tempt Jesus to step off a cliff to prove that he’s actually the son of God. Like, you can _see_ snow, so maybe it’s too tangible an effect to ask of God. Maybe He was _going_ to make it snow and then I _asked_ Him for snow, and He cancelled it. But… anyway. I still catch myself doing it now sometimes, when I want work off, or I don’t want it to rain. And, like, now whenever it snows, some part of my brain always thinks that some kid somewhere is praying really hard for a snow day tomorrow, and that she must be really psyched seeing her prayers come to fruition.”

He thinks he sees Enjolras’ mouth twist out of the corner of his eye, but maybe it’s just an illusion caused by the movement of the flurries falling past. Grantaire takes a nervous drag off his cigarette in the silence suddenly created by the absence of his voice.

“You like the snow?” he asks.

Enjolras dips his chin. He makes a noncommittal noise.

“What?” Grantaire snorts. “No opinions for once? Or do the trivialities of the mundane simply escape your notice? Cold, hot: why the fuck would Enjolras care? His skin is made of marble, after all! He’s a statue of some avenging angel come to life, a figure even Michelangelo wouldn’t be able to think up, every perfect spiral aligning—”

“Shut up.”

Grantaire shuts up, his smile falling, eyes as quiet as a dog playing fetch who’s just been kicked instead of thrown the ball. Enjolras is snarling at him, cigarette snuffed out in the snow.

“I don’t think of myself like that,” Enjolras snaps. “And I don’t know why you think that I do. But…”

He stops, his jaw working, eyes lit up—and then he lets out a growl, turns on his heels, and yanks open the door of the Musain.

He’s gone with the sound of the door swinging shut. It’s quiet. The snow is falling. And Grantaire can hardly even believe that Enjolras was there just moments ago. His foggy brain wheels backwards through whatever’s just been said, whatever Enjolras has just (probably rightfully) accused him of, but he can’t make heads or tails of it.

Well. Water under the bridge, really.

He sucks down the last quarter of his current cigarette while he shakes out another and, before he knows that his feet are moving, he’s halfway down the block already, on his way home. He lights his new smoke, tosses out the old, and traipses off into the night, into the snow.

\---

“Is R still out there?”

Enjolras’ is shaken out of red, red tunnel vision by Musichetta snapping her fingers at him over the bar.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Is R still out there?’”

“Oh,” says Enjolras. “Yes. He is.”

“Go get him, honey; would you?” It’s less of a command than a question. She hardly even pauses in her spinning, grabbing, shaking to make sure that he listens—but he does, he turns around and heads back out the door.

Outside, there is snow. There is the little glowing flower shop. There is no Grantaire.

He comes back inside, stomping snow off of his beat-up Docs, and calls to Musichetta over the hum of laughter and the soft indie music, “I think he went home.”

Carbonated something-or-other hits the glass wrong and flies up onto her apron. She slams the tap back down. Enjolras can see her lips moving fast and, oh shit, it doesn’t look pretty.

“What did you need him for?” he asks.

Her towel flies, snaps.

“Come here,” she says, rapping an acrylic nail on the bar. He’ll never know how she manages to keep them so nice. And so _sharp_. He squares his shoulders and steps up.

“I know you and R have your problems,” she says, “but—”

“We’re fine.”

“Yeah. Great. You’re best friends. Now go catch up to him and get him home and get him to go to bed.”

“I… What?”

“ _Get him home,_ ” she snarls. “Look, I love him to death, but I don’t trust him, and I am _not_ losing my fucking job or my _license_ over him. I’d ask someone else, but they’re all in the meeting, and it’ll take too long.”

“I don’t know that—”

“You’re wasting time.”

“But the meeting—“

“Go, Enjolras.”

She looks like a bird of prey when she glares at him like that, gold eyeliner and huge false lashes and shimmery highlight pressed everywhere.

Enjolras heaves a long sigh.

He zips up his jacket again.

“Quick like a bunny, now, darling,” says Musichetta, spinning back around and grabbing the Peach Schnapps without another glance his way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many many sads and much much cheesy writing. it's been A Week, friends.
> 
> oh yeah, and since everyone writes them in NYC, i figure i can write them in philly. i feel like they fit in better there anyways

Enjolras has never liked the snow. It’s an inconvenience to the machinations of society—and it’s not as though he holds much regard for the machinations of society, but the people who fall prey to any entanglement of them are the same people who are forced to rely on them the most. People with garages don’t run late when it snows. People with cars don’t show up to work with wet boots and aren’t denied entrance to overstuffed buses.

Plus, it’s fucking _cold_.

If anyone looks out their window, they would see what looks like a twelve-year-old boy in a red jacket darting and leaping around and over the drifts of snow that have collected on the sidewalk in efforts to keep his Docs dry. Enjolras’ cheeks are stinging with cold and, admittedly, his lungs are burning a little as he bounces up on the tips of his toes at each corner of the block—one, then the other, and then circling around back to the ones behind the Musain—looking everywhere for Grantaire. He doesn’t know where the guy lives, much less the myriad of other places he might be going.

And then— _there_ —on the last corner he sees a shape in a dark sweatshirt moving in the opposite direction.

“Hey!” he calls, and when the figure doesn’t stop or seem to hear, he starts bounding towards it, nearly getting hit by a Chevy with its lights off whipping around the corner as he crosses the street. He stops to growl in the driver’s direction and flip them the finger—and then, when he looks up again, the sweatshirt he’s chasing is gone.

Off Enjolras goes, wet boots be fucked. He races up the sidewalk—nearly slips on a patch of ice—catches himself on a telephone pole that rips open his finger with its accumulation of years and years of flyer staples—his ears throb—he rounds the corner—

And there is Grantaire, standing under a lit awning with a switchblade out.

Enjolras skids to a halt.

Grantaire blinks.

“Oh shit,” he says.

“What the fuck?” Enjolras cries. “What are you doing?”

Grantaire straightens up a little and looks sheepishly down at his knife, his taut shoulders deflating.

“I thought, uh—” he says. “Well, I didn’t know who you were, and you were chasing me, and so I—um, sorry, Enjolras. I’m an idiot. My bad.”

He’s stuffing the blade back into the pocket of his jeans as he speaks, tugging his sweatshirt down, running a hand through his wild hair (it’s too long, much longer than his usual close crop, and curls turn up by his chin like a little girl in some sixties cartoon.) His laugh, when he laughs, might reassure Enjolras if Grantaire didn’t look so nervous. And so run-down. The fairy lights on the underside of the awning make his skin look too thin and the hollows around his eyes look almost worrying.

“So, uh, why _are_ you chasing me down the streets of Philly in the dark in the snow with no one else around?” Grantaire asks. “Come to finish defending your name against my insults? ’Cause, no offense, but that’s kind of petty to give me a scare like that if that’s what you were doing. I mean, I’m sorry I—whatever, but I wasn’t looking to insult you in the first place. I think very highly of you, so it doesn’t make sense that I would—I mean, I don’t really remember what it is I said, but I probably didn’t mean it seriously, whatever it was. Sometimes words just kind of push their ways out of my mouth and I don’t even feel like I made them up in the first place. It’s like they just appear. I mean, it gets to the point where I wonder sometimes if language and ideas are stronger than the people who generate them—and, I mean, I guess they are, because a fuckton of ideas have outlived everybody who started them and will outlive us, but that isn’t quite what I mean—but, no, sorry, this isn’t an excuse; it’s just me getting off-track. I’m sorry for being a dick to you before, and now, and just because I didn’t mean to be a dick doesn’t mean that I wasn’t. And now you find me pointing a knife at you. That doesn’t look good. But I didn’t know you were you—and, uh, wait, why are you here anyway? That’s what I meant to ask. I hope it’s not because I was a dick to you.”

Enjolras has tucked his hands into the pockets of his jacket and is standing there, watching him talk, and looking a bit nonplussed beyond his annoyance. His breath is cold and visible in the air, curling just outside the little circle of light under the awning.

“You _were_ a dick to me,” he says, slowly. “And that’s _not_ a very good apology, so I don’t accept. But let’s table that for now, alright? Musichetta’s sent me to walk you home.”

This information seems to hit Grantaire like a small bullet. He blinks, deflating further, taking either side of his sweatshirt hood in hand and pulling them close almost like he’s afraid someone’s gonna go for his throat. He sucks in a breath of air.

“Oh,” he says.

“Where do you live?” Enjolras asks.

“Um,” says Grantaire. “This way.”

He turns and, in an incline of his head, tells Enjolras to follow. Enjolras does.

\---

And then he doesn’t fucking _leave_. R tries to say goodbye to him when they get to the front door of his building. Enjolras will leave, R thinks, and then he, Grantaire, will go inside and turn on Jeopardy and curl under his blanket and nurse a bottle of Evan Williams until he falls asleep. But, no, no, _Enjolras_ wants to come inside with him and see that he gets to bed.

At any other time, R would be thrilled. Hell, he probably has a similar fantasy on a daily basis. But said fantasy doesn’t generally involve the man of his dreams being begrudgingly talked into supervising his walk home by an irritated Musichetta, seeing the inside of his shithole of an apartment, and tucking his drunk ass into bed like a naughty little boy who’s gotten into daddy’s liquor cabinet and who’ll be grounded in the morning.

R’s cheeks are burning and his eyes stinging as, after a great deal of scraping around, he shoves the key into the lock. Fuck. Fuck, he pulled a _knife_ on him. After he pissed him off earlier. And now he’s somehow been coaxed into walking him home? And getting him to bed? _Fuck_. He doesn’t even _need_ walking home or getting to bed; it’s just Chetta’s fucking rulebook. Enjolras is going to kill him in the morning. He’s going to kill _himself._

They climb the stairs in silence. R pulls the other key.

“I can manage from here,” he tells Enjolras for a second time, without looking at him. One last hope.

“Musichetta told me to get you to bed,” says Enjolras, again.

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t seem like Chetta’s jurisdiction, what I do in my own apartment.”

R’s got his hand on the unlocked doorknob. Enjolras sighs.

“No—she’s worried you’ll go out again and she’ll lose her license,” he says. “The laws about serving customers to the point of intoxication are very clear. Bahorel had that case last year about—”

“Yeah, alright, fuck you, come in,” says R, tiredly. He opens the door and steps in, Enjolras (quieted but glaring) trailing in behind him. Let him see the squalor he lives in—who gives a shit? It’s not like his opinion can get much lower.

R takes the five steps—which would be two, if it weren’t for the pile of laundry both dirty and clean-ish that is the room’s centerpiece—to his mattress on the floor and flops down in it, slush-covered Converse and all.

“I’m in bed,” he says.

Enjolras looks at him.

Grantaire sits up again with those eyes on him, tugging down his sweatshirt, hugging his arms around his knees. He lifts his chin.

“You’ve done your duty, Private Enjolras,” he says. “You are relieved.”

“I don’t feel comfortable leaving you here.”

“You don’t— _why?”_ Grantaire splutters. “C’mon, I’m home! I’m in bed! What more do you want?”

“I’m just… concerned.” Enjolras spreads his arms a bit to indicate the surrounding space.

Well, Grantaire has to admit when he takes a look around, it’s not like he’s entirely wrong: the laundry on the floor is comingled not only with sketchbooks and pens, but with a sticky assortment of emptied bottles; a flock of wine boxes nest on the countertop, and crouched up on top of the refrigerator is a collection of bottom-shelf whiskies. Grantaire has to laugh to keep the red off his cheeks.

“See, that’s my point entirely,” he says. “No reason at all for me to go out again and worry Chetta! I’m happy as a clam right here.”

Enjolras’ brow furrows, his eyes darting from Grantaire’s face to the spotty carpet. He doesn’t say anything.

“The only reason I go out to the Musain in the first place is to hear Courfeyrac read off the social media report for the week, you know,” Grantaire says. “It’s fascinating stuff. Enlightening. Hearing the comments the Catholic Student Union have left in our Twitter DMs that week just sparks something primal within me, some kind of hope for humanity that I never fully—”

“Can I stay?”

“What?”

“Can I stay?” Enjolras repeats. “Just for a bit. I mean, by the time I get back, I’ll have missed most of the meeting anyway, and I don’t feel it would be right to leave you alone.”

Grantaire flops back into his mattress with a protracted groan.

“Enjolras, I’m going to stay here, okay? I care about Chetta as much as you do. I—”

“No, I know; I just…”

“What?”

“I’m kind of worried,” Enjolras says. And when Grantaire’s face remains dumbfounded, he adds, “About you.”

It takes a second, a moment where Grantaire looks back and forth between Enjolras and his knees, his mouth curling up like a cat’s claw, provoked.

“Enjolras,” he says. “Darling. I’m a big boy.”

“You just turned nineteen in September.”

Grantaire does not a double- but a triple-take.

“How did you—? _Combeferre!_ Combeferre. Ah, shit. That motherfucker.”

Enjolras nods.

“Still, still,” says Grantaire. “I don’t need a babysitter, alright? I’ve been living officially on my own for more than a year now and—you know—in practice, I’ve been living on my own a lot longer than that. I know what I’m doing.”

“I don’t doubt it. From what else Ferre’s told me… Well, no, I just mean: I know you can take care of yourself, but I just feel that…” Enjolras’ hands fly up in the air. “Oh, never mind. Would you _like_ me to stay?”

Grantaire’s lips come apart. “Oh God, more than anything,” he wants to say. “I want you here all the time. You make my shitty apartment seem like a cathedral—burning incense and stained glass and dark-wooded gingerbreading in every corner. You transform every room you step into. If you asked the sky to stop snowing, it probably would. If you asked me to cut off both my legs, I definitely would. But that’s exactly why I want you out of here: because all of my atoms can’t possibly sit in the same room as all of your atoms without your energy spilling over and burning mine up. You are a presence. You’re a force of nature. And even the idea of you turning your eyes on me makes me want to scream—in both ecstasy and terror. I want you in my apartment, but I don’t want you in my apartment while _I’m_ in my apartment. I don’t want you seeing me. You’re an avenging angel, and no matter how many times you say, ‘Be not afraid,’ it’s never going to work. You’re always going to be something more than what my eyes can see without being burnt out.”

What he says instead is, “Well, no, not particularly.”

\---

When he shuts the door of his apartment behind Enjolras, he listens for a while. He hears his feet jog down the stairs, the slide of his slim hand on the metal bannister. He hears the _shick-clunk_ of the handle on the foyer door, and then he hears the door close.

His chest is collapsing.

His chest is collapsing.

Plan A, he thinks, pulling himself away from the door. Plan A.

He whirls around to the kitchen, stands up upon his tiptoes to retrieve the Williams from the top of the refrigerator, and takes the five steps to flop back onto his mattress. The remote bounces away, but he retrieves it. A few clicks, and he’s just in time for Double Jeopardy.

He gives a soft, lonely cheer at the announcement of a category called “It’s All Greek to Me,” and bites a slit into the plastic seal of the whiskey, pulls it off.

It will be a long night.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a warning that this chapter gets kind of serious and deals with actual issues regarding immigration in the bit with enjolras. 
> 
> also jehan's singing "roll me through the gates of hell" by mischief brew btw (mostly because i have a friend with the "pink or blue" lyric tattooed, and i think they're a lot like jehan <3)

“What are you thinking about?” Bossuet asks.

“Enjolras,” says Grantaire, which isn’t strictly true. He is thinking about Enjolras, but more in terms of “Enjolras, the concept” than “Enjolras, the person.” Because here in front of him are Joly and Bossuet sitting on the same side of the booth, and this is how their Sunday brunches at the diner go: Joly will order poached eggs and fruit, and Bossuet will order blueberry pancakes and French fries, and Joly will pick at his eggs, and Bossuet will scarf down his pancakes—and then Bossuet will steal a slice of cantaloupe from Joly’s plate and, as though this is some silent signal, Joly will proceed to eat all of the fries that are, theoretically, Bossuet’s. It’s an easy system, a wordless and a warm one, and Grantaire almost wonders whether they do it unconsciously.

Grantaire has never had that with anyone in his life. And it isn’t as though Bossuet wouldn’t happily give him every last one of his fries if he asked (although Joly might be harder to persuade)—but he would have to ask. Of course he would. And it’s silly to even consider that an issue, because it isn’t as though Bossuet personally should have to guess that Grantaire might want fries and might be embarrassed to order them and might be embarrassed of his embarrassment and might, therefore, wish that someone else would order them in his stead—it’s not about Bossuet at all, in fact. It’s not about anyone in particular. And it’s not about French fries. It’s about the asking.

When he’s sad—when he’s _particularly_ , _unbearably_ sad—he goes to Eponine. Eponine is on the bright side of being an asshole. She has some soft spots here and there but, at the end of it, she’s as self-interested as they come, which is why Grantaire loves her. She doesn’t ask questions or even respond the message the next day if he happens to text her at four AM with a string of incoherent similes comparing the pain in his chest to a neutron star. She doesn’t care, and therefore she’s a safe place to put his shit. He can say whatever he wants to her and she’ll still be there, raising an eyebrow, shrugging her shoulders, and saying, “Yeah, ain’t that fuckin’ life, man.” But at the same time as he appreciates all that, sometimes the whole tough-love thing doesn’t cut it, and it hurts when you bear your throat to someone only to have them cover it up again rather than kiss it.

And _that’s_ the problem. That lack of closeness. The feeling that Eponine—but not just Eponine, of course—doesn’t understand the full extent of what’s hurting him because, if she _did_ , she’d say something; she’d do something. And if Eponine is the closest that he has, what about Joly and Bossuet, practically cuddled up there side-by-side in the booth? Do they see the empty space next to him on his side of the table? Do they smell the cheap vodka on his breath? And if he told _them_ that his chest felt like a neutron star, what would _they_ say? The problem is that they probably would just say, “Oh.”

This is Enjolras, the concept. This loneliness, this craving for recognition.

So when he says, “Enjolras,” and, looking down at his cup of coffee, hears Bossuet go, “Mmm,” and Joly click his tongue, the world gets very dizzy for a moment, and painfully bright.

“But not that now,” Grantaire says, smiling up. “Tell me how your new kitty’s doing, Joly.”

\---

Jehan’s minivan has a cracked windshield and a bashed-in taillight and a colorful array of flowers painted across its bumper and a queen-sized mattress where the trunk and backseats should be—and right now, Jehan and Grantaire are sitting, cross-legged, on the mattress. Jehan has hair like a cartoon princess which falls all the way down to their thighs in what Grantaire can only think to describe as a “cascade.” It’s the orangey color of candlelight, glistening back and forth as they bob their head to the bootleg playing over the car’s stereo, their long, delicate fingers packing another bowl. Said bowl resides in a contraption made out of a seashell and a deer’s antler which, as Jehan explained, their friend made and traded to them for a chunk of polished labradorite and a book about West African birds.

Jehan has many books; in fact, their warm little nest back here is overrun with them. There’s an entire corner dedicated to ancient Egyptian religion and burial practices, and another given over to Beat poetry. The bulk of them—Mallory and Chaucer, Walpole and Shelley, Wilde and Doyle—are stacked up against the trunk door, covering the windows, providing such a sense of easy security and comfort that Grantaire feels he might well fall asleep here. Jehan themself is like some kind of spiced hot drink embodied—a matcha latte maybe—comforting and a little bit strange. Big, lamplike eyes and a whispery voice and the faint smell of lilies. The vaguest sensation that you were supposed to be going somewhere else, but you’ll stay here just a while with them now.

“… _offer pink or blue, I’ll take the blackest. When you offer only two, I’ll offer threeee …_ ” Jehan is crooning under their breath as they rub their fingertips together over the bowl for the final time and then wipe them off onto their bare skinny knee. They pick up their lighter, which has a cartoon ghost on it— _whvit, whvit_ —and suck in the smoke. Grantaire takes the pipe when they hand it to him.

The two of them pass it back and forth in silence until everything is ash, and then Jehan opens the door and knocks the remnants out onto the hard-packed dirt of the empty country road. They’re just outside the city somewhere, where the tight-packed houses given sudden way to endless rows of corn. In the dark, right now, they sway under the push of the wind, rustling like a sea of dry, featherless wings. Somewhere around here is where Jehan parks their van and sleeps in a house with other people that they don’t talk about.

Jehan, wordlessly, pops open the Ziplock and starts packing another bowl. Grantaire crawls across the space between them and lays his head in their lap. His world is spinning a little bit, very gently, encircled in the fluffy cloud of pink tulle that is their skirt. Their hands run through his hair as they murmur along with the music.

_“To the witches! To the goblins and the troooo-olls…”_

\---

“…show up in their offices! Become a physical presence. Our representatives have been ignoring progressive ideologies for too long, but it becomes harder to ignore an idea when that idea is standing right in front of you, and. The freeholders are a good place to start—or, even, along a different line of action, the deans at the university. The university has a team of lawyers on payroll, and convincing our school’s president that it would be in his best interest to fight on behalf of his students could—”

“That’s not gonna do shit,” Grantaire calls out, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms across his chest.

Enjolras takes a pause.

 _Deep breaths_ , he thinks, glaring at a point along the back wall.

“—could make a significant impact not only in our community, but in the country in general.”

“How so?”

“Well,” Enjolras says. There is a howling face represented in the knots of the wood paneling up near the ceiling. “As I said, the university has a team of lawyers at its command and if, for instance, ICE agents were to arrive and stand outside Mu—”

A high-pitched cackle from Grantaire cuts him off in his tracks.

“You think they care more about undocumented students than they care about complying with the feds?”

“No. No, I know they don’t. But I also know that they care about money, and therefore about the tuitions of incoming students and appealing to their—”

“Yeah, but the students who are paying full tuition prices aren’t the ones who are supporting students without documentation. The university is a corporation. It cares the most about the people who give it the most money—and so the logical conclusion is that it cares the least about its students who are in the most need.”

A boiling hot knot of blood is spinning down at the bottom of Enjolras’ throat. He’s looking back at Grantaire now: at his oily, disheveled mess of hair, at his sweatshirt sleeves pushed up around his big forearms, at the flash of mismatched teeth under his lips curling up, ready to laugh at him...

“So you think it’s useless even to try,” Enjolras says. He can hear his own voice, robotic and taut with barely-suppressed fury.

“I mean, yeah,” Grantaire says, the first two legs of his chair falling back to the floor with a bang. He’s fucking _flippant_. “Why waste your time trying to convince assholes to listen to you for the right reasons when you know and acknowledge that their only motivation is greed? It benefits them to pretend to work with undocumented students, but it benefits them more to not have to engage in a legal battle over said students. They’re never going to—”

“So what do you suggest that we do?”

“I don’t fuckin know. I just know—”

“So how is you input helpful to us?”

Grantaire is laughing hard now, snorting and waving a hand around in the air as he takes a sip from whatever he’s drinking. Enjolras waits in blistering silence. The room is cold, watching them.

“Well, gee, Enjy-boy—and here I thought you were a socialist. Is my opinion less valuable than yours?”

“It is when you can’t offer a useful suggestion and when you’ve made it clear that your only motivation for being here is to get belligerently drunk.”

Enjolras watches Grantaire take his words.

Grantaire’s face doesn’t move. His body doesn’t move. His eyes lose their playful animosity and go blank. Enjolras’ chest suddenly weighs a million pounds.

“Ah,” says Grantaire with a little smile, because there’s nothing else to say, and he brushes his hand through the air again and takes another sip from his glass.

Enjolras clears his throat and goes on.

\---

R sets four alarms these days, each ten minutes apart. It’s a sophisticated system: the first goes off when he _could_ get out of bed, the second when he _should_ get out of bed, the third when he _needs_ to get out of bed, and the fourth as a final precaution.

Today is the day that, despite said system, he sleeps until late afternoon and wakes to find two voicemails from his boss. The first is annoyed. The second is concerned.

He turns his phone off and rolls over.

\---

It’s January 18th and Combeferre has his favorite seat in the library: floor 3B, an isolated desk right beside one of the thirteen outlets on this level, a window at his left looking down on an exit to the highway and the river beyond. He’s got a venti caramel macchiato with an extra shot of espresso cupped between his hands, and his laptop screen is glowing. The sky outside is ominous and the river is roiling, its skin getting pricked over with slushy rain. He can hear the faint whooshes of the cars going by below. He takes a sip of his coffee, puts it down, and steadies his fingers over the keyboard again, a new thought coming to mind—

He jumps.

The loud sound is at first a source of annoyance and then one of embarrassment as he realizes that it’s his own phone that’s ringing loud and clear from the pocket of his coat. He scrabbles for it, scraping back his chair. The numbers blink up on the screen—unknown.

He answers, getting up, long legs propelling him forward through an aisle between the bookshelves to the bathroom, where he can talk.

“Hello, Joseph speaking,” he murmurs into the receiver.

“Hi, Joseph,” says a voice from the other side of the line. “It’s Lori Wales from the Huntington Theater. I’m calling regarding Kristen Grantaire. You’re listed as her emergency contact.”

Combeferre’s stomach goes cold. He’s three steps from the bathroom.

He makes his legs keep moving.

He pulls open the door.

“Joseph?”

“Yes, sorry,” says Combeferre. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror—wide eyes—and turns around, face to the yellow tile wall. “Is everything alright?”

“I would hope so. Kristen hasn’t shown up to work in three days, and we’re all a bit concerned. You wouldn’t happen to know her whereabouts?”

“No,” says Combeferre. “I wouldn’t.”

“Ah,” says Lori. “Well. Would you mind calling her and checking in? She hasn’t been answering her phone when I call.”

“Not at all.”

“Please call back if you’re able to get in touch with her.”

“Yes. I will.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Of course.”

“Bye now.”

“Bye now.”

One of the tiles on the wall reads, in bright red pen, “Fuck this shit.” Combeferre wholly agrees.

He scrolls through, finds R’s number and press is as he turns back around. He shuffle-walks over to the mirror, looking back at his own eyes and listening to the dial tone.

“Hello?” asks Grantaire’s voice on the third ring.

Combeferre’s lungs fill up with air again.

“I’ma whoop your ass, boy,” he says.


	5. Chapter 5

“Go away.”

“Are you kidding me?”

There’s no answer. Combeferre bangs the pinky side of his fist against the door, and leans his ear up against the cold metal to listen. Through it, he can hear a low hum, like music turned all the way down.

“Let me in!” he yells. “You’re being a big fucking baby!”

He doesn’t feel bad about it a minute later; he doesn’t.

“R!”

“Don’t wanna see anyone,” says a muffled voice from behind the door.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to see you neither right now; I’m supposed to be writing about the future of prosthetic hands, but as your boss has just called me to make sure you weren’t dead, and as you sounded significantly less than sober in the five seconds that you gave me on the phone, I came by to see that you weren’t on your way to _being_ dead, and I think the bare minimum response to this would be to open your door up to the guy who’s just been given half a damn lecture over the phone by someone he’s never met because his friend’s apparently too busy just chillin’ in his apartment to even _call his boss back_ —”

The door opens.

“M’alive,” R says. “Go away.”

His eyelids flutter and then droop closed all together, his cheek against the doorframe. Combeferre takes a step forward to catch his elbow, and Grantaire grabs hold of the fabric of his shirt. He steadies himself. He releases Combeferre in favor of leaning back against the wall, still clutching at the doorknob, and looks up under his heavy eyelashes, chin on his chest, half angry, half sheepish.

Combeferre takes a deep breath in through his nose.

“I was gonna suggest we go for a walk,” he says, “but now that seems a little over-optimistic.”

R snorts.

“…told you… didn’t want to see anyone,” he mutters. His back slides down the wall either purposefully or incidentally—gracelessly either way—as Combeferre watches, and he ends up on the floor, folding his legs under him like he meant to all along.

Combeferre takes a smart step inside and closes the door behind him.

“Grantaire,” he says, addressing the ceiling, “here is what we’re going to do—”

 _Die_ , Grantaire wants to say, as the image of Combeferre standing over him flashes and shudders like a dream. _Curl up under the covers in my bed and die, hopefully_.

“I’m going to get you some water and start a pot boiling. Do you have pasta or rice or anything?”

R’s eyes track Combeferre as he moves toward the kitchen and swipes a dirty glass off the counter. “Why?”

“You’re gonna call your boss back.”

Grantaire feels like he’s swallowed an icicle.

“Ferre… I… can’t. She can’t—I’m not good right now. Why’d she have to call you? I can’t call her. I’m not…” His hands are on his face, a dark, warm cave. “I’m very, very drunk right now, Ferre.”

“I know, genius.” Combeferre’s voice is right in front of him. He opens his eyes and accepts the glass of water being handed to him. “Drink this. I’m gonna make some rice.”

By the time R gets a sip down, Ferre’s already found the right cabinet. Has he done this before? He shoves aside the sundry debris on the counter, heaves the bag out, and plops it down.

 “When you pull this shit,” he says as he works, “you’re letting life take advantage of you.”

“Let it,” says Grantaire, not even sure himself what he means by this, whether it’s past tense or present or future, a command or a statement.

Combeferre fits a lid over the pot and folds his hands behind his head like he has a cramp from running. His laces his fingers together, leans his neck back, presses the heels of his palms into the back of his head as tight as his dreads will give, until his skull feel like it might crack. Then he lets go, swings his arms, and laughs a little.

“You’ve probably seen videos of this on Facebook and shit, but they’re already learning how to connect nerve cells to prosthetics, so that the electrical impulses that the brain sends can actually control the mechanisms in the new robotic limb—it’s usually an arm—and make the fingers open and close and everything.”

“Mm,” says R.

“All of our movements—everything we do is controlled by our body’s electrical systems, stemming from the brain and the spine. I’m sure you learned that in your high school Bio class. And you’re a smart dude; I’m sure you know more, and I’m sure it sounds like I’m condescending to you. But what I’m trying to say on the most basic level—what my paper’s got me thinking about—is where do these electrical impulses come from? I mean, I know the practical answer: the practical answer is that they’re fired off by neurons in the brain and sometimes in the spinal cord, and that the initial energy to produce them comes from the food that we eat and the air that we breathe. But, I’m saying… where does the impulse to _create_ an impulse come from? You can think to yourself, ‘Oh, I want my arm to move,’ and a neuron will fire off and shoot a signal down to your arm and your arm will move. But how does the brain tell a neuron to fire? Well, in physical terms, it has to do with ions and semi-permeable membranes that uptake sodium and potassium and create electricity based on that. The amounts of sodium and potassium that can be taken up are controlled by neurotransmitters like adrenaline or acetylcholine, which are tied to organs like the thalamus and the thyroid. You know what adrenaline is, obviously, and when I say, ‘a rush of adrenaline,’ you know what that feels like.  So, basically, what I’m trying to say is—and this is just a basic overview—but the brain is the commander of our whole system, and everything that happens in the human world is based on these tiny, tiny little cells controlled by rushes of sodium and potassium, which are controlled by rushes of neurotransmitters—which are tied really intimately with how we feel.”

Combeferre stops to take a breath. Grantaire is blinking at him, looking more taken aback by this affront of science than confused by it. This is a good sign.

“That’s where the weird part comes in,” Combeferre says, “because no one is entirely sure how emotions work. There are a whole bunch of theories, of course, and we know which centers of the brain are tied to which emotions—but that feeling of grief? That deep, physical ache in your chest that you get sometimes? The actual sensation of your heart breaking, when you feel almost sure that you could die of it, but there’s nothing really wrong except that _feeling_ —no one can explain why that feels the way it does.”

Grantaire’s eyes have shifted off of Combeferre’s face to the tiles on the floor.

“It feels like we’re in pain, and our body’s natural response to pain is, ‘Something is wrong; fix it.’ One way to fix pain, particularly emotional pain, is to slow the neurotransmitters that, well, transmit it. Sometimes I think the body _instinctually_ knows what we’re doing more than we, consciously, do. It’s almost magical in that way.”

Combeferre is stirring the rice. Grantaire is sucking on his teeth, staring a hole in the ground.

“In other words,” Ferre says, “I understand certain things from a medical perspective. But, unfortunately, we live in a capitalist society that values tangible things over the more ethereal ones, and if we choose to dwell too long in our emotions, as is the tendency of some of the best and brightest among us, we’ll probably end up out in the streets in the snow if we don’t have friends with empty couches.” He looks over. “You do, by the way, have friends with empty couches. But I think you prefer the comfort of that weird little setup you’ve got goin’ on over there.”

He jabs a thumb at the mattress, with its nest of ugly floral sheets tangled up in books and bottles and sweatshirts and ballpoint pens, the TV sitting across from it, the little speaker in the corner murmuring out what Combeferre now recognizes as the Pixies’ _Doolittle._

Grantaire half-smiles.

“And I prefer it too, if I’m being honest,” Ferre continues. “Courf and I have a good thing going, and I can’t have him see you show me up yelling _Jeopardy_ answers out at the screen. Plus then I’d have two of you painting your nails in different colors of glitter every other night, and I’d lose my fucking mind. Your rice is done.”

He says this all so flatly that Grantaire has to laugh, even though his cheeks are burning and his underarms are all slick and sweaty with the idea of calling Lori back.

Combeferre pours a whole bunch of olive oil and salt on the scoop of rice in the bowl, like Grantaire’s a little kid, and stirs it as he brings it to him there on the floor. He doesn’t ask him to try to get up, for which Grantaire is thankful.

“Eat,” he says.

“Thank you.”

Combeferre nods. There’s no “you’re welcome” or “no problem,” because he’s not and it is. This is why Combeferre is his emergency contact, and not Jehan.

Grantaire eats.

\---

He gets his job back. No one but Lori looks directly at him for a few days, like the curls in his hair might suddenly rear up and strike, hissing.

\---

He holds a level balance. On Wednesday, he gets himself into a pair of basketball shorts and meets Bahorel at the gym for the first time in a month. Bahorel’s red, beardy face breaks into a wide grin when R appears on the other side of his punching bag. He opens his arms wide and pulls him into a sweaty hug, slapping his back with his boxing gloves still on and saying, “Didn’t think you’d show!”

“Yeah,” says R, sheepishly. “I’m here.”

“ _Yeah_ , you are!” Bahorel does a little hop-skippy-handbanging thing like a minotaur, punching the air once. Grantaire can’t help but snort. “Get your gloves on and get ready to get the shit beat out of you.”

They spend a couple minutes warming up, and then climb into the ring when its previous occupants finish. The mat is half-solid under Grantaire’s feet—he wishes he could take his shoes off and feel it, cold and springy as moss in his instep. He paces around a bit and then hops up to Bahorel’s face—thick eyebrows and a gingery-brown beard, eyes like smooth grey pebbles. You expect the Southern drawl that comes out when he opens his mouth, but not the gentle can’t-help-it smile that lights up when he talks about his latest special-effects makeup design.

They look at each other a while.

Then: “Go,” says Bahorel, and R trots backwards, fists raised.

 _Come and get me_ , the quirk of his eyebrow says.

The advantage of fighting Bahorel is that he’s massive. R himself is a big guy; he’s not particularly quick, and can’t by any stretch of the imagination be called _delicate_ —but he’s smart, and he boxes like he plays chess: thinking two moves in advance. So when Bahorel comes lumbering at him with all the grace of a bull at a tea party, R steps to the left at the last moment and then forward, knocking two solid blows into his opponent’s ear.

Bahorel squawks and spins—and charges. Grantaire gets a mouthful of glove for that one. He pummels back, his plan falling out of place, everything turning grey and hot—

And then he’s on the ground.

Bahorel’s laughing, but it’s not the usual hearty boom that usually accompanies; it’s something squeakier, more nervous. He holds out his hand for R to grab onto, and pulls him back to his feet.

“That was a quick one,” Bahorel says, pounding him on the arm. “Losin’ your touch.”

He means it to sound like their usual back-and-forth, but it’s too close to the truth to make R do anything but laugh. He walks back to the center, looking down at the mat. He can almost feel the cock of Bahorel’s head and the wince in his jaw behind his back—but he’s standing in front of him a minute later, nearly forehead-to-forehead again.

They breathe.

“Go,” says R, and they go again.

\---

They’re sitting on the cold metal bench later, red and sweaty, side by side, when Bahorel knocks his knee against Grantaire’s.

“Hey,” Bahorel says, his pebble eyes soft when he looks at him, and a warm little shudder gathers at the nape of R’s neck. “You know you can talk to me about shit, right?”

Grantaire blinks. He has to look away, down at the hair on his knee.

He grunts, and nods a little.

“I mean it.”

“I know,” says Grantaire.

The world whirls around their little bench. Everything is very quiet in the gym, and he can hear Bahorel breathing slowly through his nose, the tinny sound of a boombox somewhere in another room, weights clanking. The room smells like plastic and skin and disinfectant, somewhere where people shouldn’t be, somewhere exciting and scary. His blood is still hard and heavy in his ears from dancing around the boxing ring, and his feet are feeling too stiff in his shoes again.

Eventually, Bahorel says, “You wanna go get dinner?”

Grantaire’s up off the bench in a second.

“Fuck yeah I do.”

\---

Eponine corners him at the next meeting when he’s coming out of the bathroom. Her hands encircle his biceps, and her fingers rub small circles into them in time with her body swinging forward, her hips crowding up into his and grinding. The hallway is dark: one lamp on a rickety table, red-painted walls, black-and-white photos picked up from junk sales.

She puts her mouth against his mouth, all teeth and hot breath. He makes a muffled noise, half-surprised, half-aroused, and pushes back, his hands moving down to clutch at her bony waist. His fingernails dig into her shirt, his tongue exploring the roof of her mouth.

“R,” she whispers into the corner of his lips. She takes like beer and lipstick. “I’m so sad.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t stand it.”

“I know.”

She runs the tips over her fingers along his jawline until her hands meet at his chin.

“Let’s go in the bathroom,” she says.

He says, “Okay.”

\---

Musichetta is blushing, which is not something she does often.

“I mean it!” Bossuet is practically shouting. “Joly and I were flipping out when we read it. He had to tell me to stop standing on the couch, because our couch has a hole in it—”

“You were ripping it!” Joly yelps.

“That whole line on intersectionality being essential to the very fundamentals of feminism—”

“I liked the part about gender being performative but obligatory in our current social structure and how that relates to the—”

“Who did that illustration on the page opposite, by the way?”

“—your writing style is so flow-y and pretty—”

“Joly, shut up; will you? I’m trying to ask her a question.”

“I’m trying to compliment her!”

“No, but seriously—”

“Yeah, seriously—”

“It was beautiful.”

“And you’re beautiful, too!”

“Gahhh! We’re talking about the zine, Joly; leave her alone.”

“I just want to make sure she knows—”

“R,” says Musichetta in relief. She lays her head against the bar and stretched out her hand to Grantaire as he appears, red-cheeked and shiny-eyed, to their right. “Please order a complicated drink and give me something to do. Ernie and Bert over here are flustering me.”

Joly and Bossuet fall silent, turning to look at each other. Joly opens his mouth to say something, but a look from Bossuet silences him. The corner of Grantaire’s mouth twitches.

“Um,” he says. “How about one of those foamy things that Courf drinks?”

“Pink Squirrel!” She smacks the bar, turning to her wall of liquors. “Good. Thank you.”

While she mixes, Grantaire grabs a napkin and rummages through the pocket of coat—earbuds, a tampon, a bent-up pack of cigarettes—and finds a felt-tip pen. The sound of ice-cubes hitting the metal and glass as Musichetta shakes his drink is one of the most satisfying sounds he can think of. She pours it out with clinks and a whoosh. It is, indeed, a pale shade of pink. Lovely.

“Here,” she says.

“I’ll trade you,” says Grantaire and, as he takes his drink, he hands her the napkin. It has two phone numbers chicken-scratched down on it.

“You’re welcome,” he says with a salute to Joly and Bossuet, and saunters away.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can someone come beat up my pacing issues and me, thx

He’s smoking outside, scuffing his toes on the sidewalk in the unseasonably warm evening. There’s a comfortable thrum in the front of his brain, just in that beautiful sweet spot between tipsy and drunk, and there’s a songbird whistling up on a power line somewhere. The dusk is purple-gold, the sky like one of those planetarium projector domes in a science museum. He could almost start humming, he feels so good.

And then Enjolras comes out through the Musain door. Grantaire turns on one foot, clocks him, and gives him something between a nod and a lazy bow, a smile climbing up his face and his heart sinking into his belly.

“Hey,” says Enjolras. “Um. Can I borrow a cigarette?”

“I don’t know. _Can_ you? And will you give it back?” Grantaire’s already digging through his pockets. Enjolras scowls, coming up closer.

“You sound like my dad,” he says.

Grantaire almost makes a joke that he’ll regret, but he’s trying to learn to keep his mouth shut these days—shit knows for what purpose at this point, but it seems a general positive philosophy or perhaps, at least, an act of mercy to everyone around him. He finishes his scrounging and taps one out into Enjolras’ palm.

“Thank you.”

“You need a light?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“C’mere.”

Oh fuck, he thinks as he flicks his lighter, the sudden realization of what he’s doing crashing over him. Oh fuck. Enjolras has lips made of something firmer but just as engrossingly plushy as memory foam, and the most perfect little dip of a Cupid’s bow above the top one. His fingers are long and slim, and his thumb nearly traces his throat as he lifts his hand, cigarette pushing between those lips. His collarbones are like little hummingbird wings. Their shadows dance as he sucks in; they make R’s mouth go dry. He wants to put his tongue in them. He wants to trace his own fingers along that sharp jawline. He wants to pull his yellow hair, tangle it in his hand, crush Enjolras beneath him and hear him—

“Thanks.” Enjolras blows out smoke.

“No problem,” says Grantaire, tucking his lighter back into his pocket.

“I’m freaking out a little bit,” Enjolras says and, for a moment, Grantaire is surprised at this unprecedented and unexpected confession, turning to look at him with his eyebrows up, before he realizes Enjolras is justifying his smoking.

“What’s up?” Grantaire asks, trying to sound casual but ending up exactly where he hates people to be—that concern, that softness—and he doesn’t blame Enjolras when he glares into the sidewalk.

“Just a lot,” Enjolras says, which doesn’t mean anything at all.

“Mm.”

The world goes kind of silent then except for the bird singing somewhere, and the sounds of cars whooshing by on adjacent streets: tires and radios and an uncovered muffler. R can feel Enjolras’ energy thrumming beside him. He decides to push the point.

“Like what?”

Enjolras lets out a short, irritable sigh.

“Like… I don’t know,” he says. “School, maybe. It doesn’t matter.”

Grantaire reels away a little bit, incredulous, laughing.

“Ah, fuck,” he says. “What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t matter?’ Like fuck, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ You’re…” He sucks in on his cigarette, burning down the last half-inch in one go, shaking his head. He throws it down and steps on it. “You’re you. Everything about you matters.”

Enjolras’s face curls into an expression Grantaire doesn’t recognize. It’s something close to amusement, but more uncomfortable than that. Like someone’s told him a joke that he’s not sure if he should be offended by.

“I’m me?” he says. “What does _that_ mean, Grantaire?”

“It means you’re…” Grantaire’s hands fly through the air like he’s trying to grab words out of it. “You’re Enjolras. How could anything you do not matter? I feel like you were sent from some other realm to save all of our mortal souls, and that when you leave our sight every night you must be flying back to the spirit world to report on our misdeeds and accomplishments—and obviously that’s not true; I’m just making metaphors for the sake of explaining—but you are definitely a different class and breed of person than most of us. Particularly me. I mean, you do everything. And everything you do is amazing. I feel like from the moment you wake up in the morning you’re examining what you can do in that very second to make the world a better place, or at least a different place—maybe not even consciously, but you try so hard. You’re so… perfect. And so anything that’s going on and going badly in your life is a detriment to us all, because anything that could affect you is bound to send tidal waves over the rest of us. That’s not why I ask—I’m, you know, I’m concerned about you, not myself or something because, again, I don’t mean all that literally—but everything… Your everything matters. And it matters in the extreme. The tiniest thing matters in the extreme about you, because you are the extreme. You’re the ultimate. You know?”

Enjolras is blinking at him.

“No!” he says. It’s half-helpless, caught up in a laugh.

“What do you mean?” Grantaire asks.

“I mean I don’t know. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying,” says Grantaire, “that you are perfect and I would do anything to help you.”

Enjolras is staring somewhere in the area of Grantaire’s Converse, his eyes wide, his forgotten cigarette burning in his fingers. Grantaire lets him do that for a moment, trying to collect the hammering of his heart.

“Oh no,” he says, to no one in particular. “I’ve broken him.”

Enjolras looks up, the glare that R recognizes so well tacked back on his face.

“I just wish you would stop using so much sarcasm around me,” he says. “You know I have trouble with it. I’ve discussed this in meetings before.”

“I—what?”

Enjolras drops his cigarette and steps on it neatly, picks it back up, heading to the garbage can on the curb. He’s very calm, very annoyed.

“You know what I mean,” he says. “This whole bit you do where you try to play into my apparently massive ego, as though I expect everyone to worship me or something. The ABC is a student union. We’re all equal and I fully acknowledge that. Sometimes I may do a bit of extra work, but it’s only because I’m passionate about what we do. I don’t think of myself as above anyone, and it’s hurtful of you to try to throw me down by—”

“Oh… oh my God… You think I’m being _sarcastic?_ ”

Enjolras’ ears are bright red, his eyes gleaming with fury.

“Stop that,” he says, each word slow and deliberate. “It’s not fucking funny.”

“Enjolras.” Grantaire can taste bile at the back of his throat. Everything is coated in some kind of thick transparent fog as he steps forward, right in Enjolras’s face. “I mean everything. I mean everything I say to you. I don’t… I mean, sure, I tease you sometimes, but only in a—I would never say anything to hurt you. Not purposefully.”

Enjolras is scrutinizing him, fire still built up behind his eyes.

“You have to believe me,” Grantaire says.

“I…” says Enjolras. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why?” Grantaire is laughing again, dizzy and bewildered. “It doesn’t make sense, because I can’t possibly like you as much as I do? Because, fuck, I would be inclined to agree with you if I had an outsider’s vantage point—I’d probably say that it was just some sort of misguided self-destructive impulse ground down into hero worship, and maybe it is—but I gotta say that me being me, I feel like do indeed just love you that… I mean…”

He reddens, startling himself halfway awake, halfway back into his body with the words he’s saying.

“You know. Well, I mean, you must know already that I’m kind of in love with you.”

Or completely in love. Or blindingly, unquenchably, torturously—

“You’re what?” Enjolras’s voice is so soft.

The number you have dialed is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone.

“Grantaire?”

“I mean, it’s no big deal,” Grantaire chokes out, palming the back of his neck. “It’s… it’s… you know. It’s no big deal.”

“I… What?”

“Never mind. It’s stupid.”

“So you’re really not just making fun of me.”

“No! No. Of course not.”

Enjolras is silent for a long minute, his eyes flicking between a lump of blue gum on the sidewalk and Grantaire. Grantaire can feel them as they graze over his acne-scarred cheek, his beefy bicep, the dirty knees of his jeans.

“I’m very flattered,” Enjolras says, and Grantaire wants to throw up. He wants to go crawl down the rain gutter and live there with the sewage. That would probably be comfortable after this.

“That’s good.”

“I’m sorry I misread your compliments.”

“Fuck, man, don’t worry about it.”

They go quiet again. The bird isn’t singing anymore. It’s almost dark now.

“Are you okay?” Enjolras asks.

He sounds almost gentle. It’s terrible.

“Yeah,” Grantaire tells him. “Don’t worry about it. We’re good now. I’m glad you know I’m not trying to be a prick.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I, uh…” Enjolras trails off.

Grantaire cocks his head at him and gives a little smile.

“I mean it. No big deal,” R says, even though it is. He reaches out and, before he can think it through, claps Enjolras’s shoulder. “I’ll see you back inside?”

Enjolras looks at him.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Good.”

And, with a casual salute, Grantaire turns his back and heads inside, the sounds of voices and laughter swelling up around him as the Musain door opens, his insides thawing out and melting in a gush of cold, murky water. He doesn’t breathe again until he gets to the bathroom and locks the door.

\---

If this were a story that someone had made up, Grantaire would now look over the past week, count his well-hatched chickens, and there see the fate toward which they are leading him. He’d look at the three days he spent in bed, he’d look at the job lost and gotten back, he’d look at the brutal kindnesses of Combeferre, he’d look at the many sympathies of his friends, and, most importantly, he’d look at the conversation that he’s just had with Enjolras. Then, all of these things considered, he would think to himself that it was about time to do something differently. His rising-up would begin posthaste. He’d climb his way back up into the light gradually but surely, with the support of his friends and the affirmation of his mind and body that he was doing the right thing. The theater’s production of _Fiddler on the Roof_ would go off without a hitch, and a kindly talent agent scoping out the actors from the audience would think to himself, “Why, those are some of the most ingenious low-budget sets I’ve ever seen,” and approach Grantaire afterwards to tell him of a guy he knows who knows a guy.

But because only slivers of real life are so controlled by a combination of cool-headedness and luck, when Grantaire stops shaking, when he stops whispering curses at himself, he does not exit the bathroom with a look of calm determination on his face and head home to do some laundry but, rather, he exits with a smirk, the conscious inflection of a swagger in his step, cracking his neck. Even in the little red hallway where the bathroom hides, the air smells thickly of limes and alcohol. Something is clawing in his belly, something warm and slimy down there is scratching toenails on wood, and he wants, wants, wants—wants deep under the skin of his palms and inside his throat. It’s stupid. He knows it’s stupid. He knows that it’s probably sick and pathetic and creepy and maybe even a little bit manipulative to look at the Party Goblin like this, to stare it in the face and still say, “Okay, have your way with me.” Because his brain _does_ take note of his body in this moment, as he steps back out into the hallway and ambles back out to the main room, and his body _does_ take note of his brain. They size one another up and nod, both wanting the same thing and wanting it _now_ , when he could very easily go home and get out of everybody’s hair and—

Maybe, though—and this is the worst part, the part from the moldiest, drippiest, dustiest part of his brain—maybe, on some level, he wants Enjolras to see this. Maybe that’s why, when he comes out of the hallway, the sight of the bar back (Reggie? Ricky?) standing there and pouring beer from the tap into a glass looks almost pornographic.

“Chetta on break?” R asks him, spreading out his palms on the wood. Reggie-Ricky grunts and takes a sip of the beer, his big black mustache getting foam in it from the inch and a half of head in the glass.

“Yeah.”

“Damn,” says R. “When’s she coming back?”

It’s been a long time since R took much stock in the idea of a higher power, but Reggie-Ricky taking the bait is nearly enough to get him on his knees.

“Why? What chu need?”

“Ah, the table sent me up for a round of shots…”

“What?” says Reggie-Ricky. “You think I dunno how to pour shots? What do you want?”

“No, no. Of course I don’t think that. I just feel bad ask you for a whole bunch is all…”

“What do you want? And how many you need?”

“Uh, fuck.” R pretends to count in his head. “I mean, give me ten vodka for now. You know how to put it on my tab, right?”

“Do I know…? Girl… Who do you think…?” Reggie-Ricky grumbles off, ducking under the counter for glasses—and a ferociousness rises up in Grantaire’s throat, tightening his teeth, putting glass over the corners of his eyes. He wants to fucking scream. He wants to rip his own heart out and show it to this goddamned bar back who can’t even pour a decent beer, rub the girl’s blood in his arteries over Reggie-Ricky’s face and say, “Look! Now you’re covered in it too! You better go put on a skirt!”

Instead he just stands there mildly and waits.

“You know,” he says when the bottle comes out, “it actually might be cheaper if I just take that and pour them out myself.”

Reggie-Ricky looks a little peeved at losing the chance to prove his shot-pouring creds.

“That’s thirty on the tab,” he says, and lifts the bottle up to inspect it. It’s a newly-opened liter, more than three-quarters of the way full. “Or… twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five’s fine.”

“Ten glasses?”

“Yes, please.”

Between the room with the bar and the back room where the meetings take place is a set of stairs that crook halfway up and a landing with a table. Grantaire stops there on the landing, reveling in its privacy, and sets down the tray that Reggie-Ricky has given him, stacking up the glasses on it. It takes him a moment to get the green plastic pour-top out of the mouth of the bottle, a fine spray of clear liquid coming out with it. He shakes off the excess around the pour-top’s rims into the two uppermost glasses in the stacks, making it look realistic, like a tray that the waiter had forgotten to take back, and then tucks the top into his pocket. He heads up into the back room with an open bottle in his hand, a grin on his face, and nothing else.

Life is good.

Enjolras is ranting about military spending up there in the wood-paneled room, his hair gleaming like water in the light of the lamps on the walls. Grantaire slips in and down into a seat beside Jehan, who gives him a quick smile and then turns, rapt, back to Enjolras. The room is filled with impassioned hearts. Grantaire can practically feel them beating.

He settles back into his chair, lifts his bottle, and takes a deep, fervent drink.

He’s never been the type of drinker to relish a burn down his throat—he’s far too intent on pleasure for that—but the vodka, though cheap, is so soothing, so warm when it reaches his belly that he almost wants to shut his eyes and sigh. It’s a feeling he’ll never get over, one that’s better than any hug he can get from a human being. Human beings have eyes, they have skin—they know who he is and he knows they don’t like what they see. Alcohol has no such judgements. There’s nothing unreciprocated or awkward about his relationship with drinking.

“…at a time when public schools are on the verge of being defunded and the wage gap between the classes is more severe than ever…”

The pleasant buzz already riding in the front of his skull goes from just that to something all-consuming over the next quarter of an hour. There’s some fear that someone will come and take the bottle away from him—Chetta, for instance, or even Joly—and so he gets through it much faster than even he really should, making no big deal about it in hopes that no one will notice. They don’t seem to. He gets enough down that the rest just seems like water, doesn’t even make him wince—the next half-hour melts on, and then he’s sitting up straight in his chair, stunned in the sense that goes with darts and wild animals, dizzy and silent, his mouth half-open to breathe through, and the bottle empty beside him.

“…countries whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the greed of our American government, who then tell our people that…”

His limbs are so loose and comfortable and, despite the roiling inside him, his insides are so warm that it doesn’t seem like a stretch for him to fall asleep here. He doesn’t want to call attention to himself. He just wants to sit here and let Enjolras’ voice wash over him, bright yellow and scratchy, filled with anger and love, soaring up to the kind of impassioned heights that might as well be mountains on the horizon that no one bothers to climb, just dreams about climbing, people settling at their bases to explore the green grass between their fingers and toes, groups of friends with checkered picnic blankets and loud laughter, someone’s famous deviled eggs recipe, someone else’s deck of cards, a patch of wildflowers and the group of rabbits who live among them, hiding in the exposed, mossy roots of wrinkled willow trees—

“Hey. Hey, R, you gotta sit up.”

Eponine’s chapped hands are on his cheeks. They’re somewhere very cold, his shoulder against hard ground. Sidewalk. He can taste vomit like blood in his mouth.

“Here,” says another voice. Jehan. “I got him.”

Wiry arms pull at his own, tugging him up until he’s kneeling. He tries his best to go with them. He feels himself get scooped up, shoulder to shoulder, levelled between Jehan and Eponine, getting his feet under himself.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s okay, honey. Just… let’s get you home.”

“Where are we going, Jehan?” Eponine asks. Her voice could cut glass.

R feels Jehan turn and ask, “Joly?”

“I still think we should call an ambulance,” Joly says.

“No,” R hears himself say. “No, no. I’m fine.”

“Your apartment or his, Joly.”

Joly makes a rare noise of annoyance. “Ours, then.”

“We have charcoal,” Bossuet reminds him, reassuringly.

R whines low in his throat, half-aware of his legs moving beneath him, everything very purple, in shades of blue. He tries to tell Bossuet that he’s being melodramatic, that charcoal’s what you give to a dog who’s gotten into the candy drawer, not to your attention-starved asshole of a friend who decided it was a good idea to try and get through nearly a liter of Svedka in the second half of some social justice club meeting, but he can’t remember the syllables to any of these words; the world is going way too fast and his heart is going way too slow. There’s sweat on his upper lip, shudders in his arms, and before he knows it, he’s puking again, his arms around his forehead on something cold and white, someone’s fingers in his hair. He’s kneeling on a tile floor now, and someone’s taken his sweatshirt and binder off. He’s down to his skin.

He hangs out down there a while, looking into the bowl of the toilet at the stingy white stuff floating on the surface, looking under the crack between the seat and the rim at his bare chest. Then he spits, weakly, and leans back into someone’s arms. Buttons scratch on his skin.

“What’s…? Why?” he asks. Jehan’s eyes are very soft.

“We’re at Joly and Bossuet’s,” they say. “It’s okay. They’re all in the living room.”

“I don’t… I’m sorry. You’re good, Jehan. You’re kind. I don’t like this. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m your friend,” they tell him, simply. They have a glass that they’re offering him, knocking it against his forearm. “Drink some water now that you’re awake.”

R takes it with hands that are leaping in some invisible wind, wedges it between his teeth. It’s cool, washing a little of the horrible taste out of his mouth, and he takes determined gulps. He gets half of it down before he has to close his eyes again, too dizzy to breathe.

Jehan’s fingers card through his sweaty hair, fingernails scritching on his scalp.

“Honey, you gotta stay awake, okay? Sit up a little more.”

“I’m fine.”

The tile floor feels like it’s somersaulting around and over him, like he’s walking through one of those tunnels in a funhouse with the bridge and the tube that spins around you, painted with glow-in-the-dark streaks.

“Hey!”

His eyes are shut again, his chin bobbing into his chest when the slap comes. It’s not hard, it’s not painful, but it’s a slap, and it makes Grantaire flinch and open his eyes, a little bit. He tries to sit up, but he’s shaking too hard; overhead, Jehan is biting their lip, looked absolutely horrified at themself.

“I’m sorry,” they say. “But you have to stay awake.”

Grantaire just swallows and nods. There’s a lump in his throat that he can’t get down.

“Can I… have my sweatshirt?”

“Of course,” says Jehan, relieved.

The fabric is soft and smells like his apartment so strongly that he wants to cry. He wants to go home. Why are they keeping him here? He doesn’t want to be here, half-naked on Joly’s bathroom floor with Jehan sitting over him and everyone else in the living room, thinking, waiting for him. He wants to go home and curl up in his bed, and he’s stuck here with everyone else, everyone watching—not alone, surrounded, in fact, on all sides. He can’t get his sweatshirt on and Jehan must hate him. They must want to go to sleep and go home and get away from all his stupid shit, but instead they’re here, looking at him, and he’s drunk and naked and ugly on the bathroom floor and—

“R? R, look at me.”

There are small fingers on his cheeks and big black eyes peering into his.

“Breathe, okay? Breathe with me.”

He’s got more bile on his tongue, sweat all over him, and here’s Joly, right in his face, touching him. He shuts his mouth, feeling himself going bright red, shame down to his core. His eyes have been leaking tears for who knows how long now. He sucks in air through his nose and lets it out.

“Good,” says Joly. “Good. Again.”

They breathe, the two of them. In through the nose, out through the nose.

His sweatshirt is back on, but not his binder; he’s propped up against the bathtub, and Jehan is standing, deathly pale, in the doorway. Bossuet and Eponine seem to be murmuring to one another out in the hallway. Joly’s fingers smooth over his cheekbones.

“In,” he says. “And out. In. And out. In…”

“It’s okay, Joly,” R says. “I’m sorry.”

“…and out. No. No sorries, my friend. I’ve had my share of panic attacks. I had one this morning.”

“And one this afternoon,” Bossuet pipes up from the shadows.

“Yes, and one this afternoon,” Joly agrees. “I have them all the time. They’ll probably never go away, because I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, but we can manage them. We can get better.”

“I have an anxiety disorder, too,” Jehan volunteers. “I take meds for it.”

“See?” says Joly. “And Bossuet has panic attacks also. He’s claustrophobic, so he gets them when we have to take the bus sometimes.”

“I haven’t gotten on an elevator in almost a decade,” Bossuet says.

“And, you know,” Eponine says, “I basically just wanna die all the time. But you know that, R.”

Jehan laughs.

“In other words, none of us care,” Joly says. “We think you’re cool.”

Grantaire looks desperately away from the eyes watching him, batting Joly’s hands away and using his own to cover his face. He can’t feel them. Everything is vibrating, static-y, and the voices around him are washing over his ears like so many notes of some off-key harmony to the roaring in his brain. This is so stupid. Everything just keeps happening over and over again.

And over again.

And over again.

Finally: he’s on the couch and the sun is rising under the panes of the window, broken into six orange pieces by strips of badly white-washed wood. Joly and Bossuet are curled up together in the armchair, one of them snoring. Jehan’s skinny shape is hunkered down on the floor under a wooly blanket. Eponine is sitting next to Grantaire on the couch, her legs crossed, scrolling through her phone.

She looks up when he stirs.

“Mm,” he says to her.

“Are you still alive?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, working his tongue around his mouth. It feels like a Brillo pad. “Judging by the lack of actual fire and brimstone, I’d say so. Judging by my stomach, though, the answer’s a little shiftier. I think that’d be a slightly over-Sartrean Hell, though. I like to hope God is more creative than that.”

She looks at him.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m alive.”

“R,” she says, and for once there’s no humor in her voice, nothing witty, nothing darkly satirical. It’s just grey. “You scared us last night.”

There it is again: that worm of self-disgust that starts in the nape of his neck and slips all the way down to his stomach, hot and terrible.

“I know,” he says.

“We’re not going to let you do that again.”

“You’re… I know. I won’t.” He looks at her. Her sentence means something more than she’s saying, but he doesn’t know what. She’s looking at him like he’s some dusty childhood picture that she has to burn, and it’s scaring him suddenly. “What do you mean?”

“We’ve talked it out,” she says. “You’re going to stay here for a few weeks.”

“I…” He frowns, not following. “Um. I mean, that’s… I don’t—”

She’s staring, hard and fierce, when hits him. He sits up, ignoring the way his vision spins.

“Wait, Eponine,” he says. “What are you saying?”

From the other side of the room, Joly groans, sleepily.

“We’re helping you get clean, R.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was so hard to write :O long, sustained chunks of narrative that stretch multiple pages ?? nah

They have a whole plan laid out, they say; there’s nothing to worry about. Joly’s pre-med; he knows about this stuff. And Ferre’s coming over, too, just to be on the safe side.

“The safe side of _what?_ ” R groans, laying his head down on the kitchen table. “Of supervising me for a few days? What do you think I’m going to do? Bang my head against the wall in mourning over the death of my freedom?”

“Dude,” says Bossuet. “Come on.”

“ _You_ come on, L’Esgle.”

Bossuet’s eyebrows go up. The quiet gets thicker. R’s teeth are grit.

“I really can’t say that I’m getting your motives behind this. Any of you. I understand that it’s shit of me to make you babysit me—fine. That’s true. But if you don’t want to babysit me, then don’t. Leave me the fuck alone. I’m an adult. I make stupid decisions, I clean them up myself. If you’re going to take me home and then get annoyed in the morning over the fact that you took me home, then don’t fucking take me home!”

“That’s not the point, R, and we’re not annoyed about taking you home. We’re annoyed because you’re not taking responsibility for yourself.”

“Then _let me!_ If you want me to… You’re not responsible for me. _I’m_ responsible for me. If you think I’m… I don’t know, gong too hard or whatever, then just ignore me. No one’s forcing you to hang out with me. In fact, I’ll make it easier for you, if that’s what you want. I’ll stop coming to the ABC meetings if I’m being too much of a distraction. I won’t got to any of your parties. I won’t smoke with Jehan in their van on Thursdays anymore. I won’t go with Bahorel to the gym—”

“That’s pathetic as fuck,” Eponine says to the ceiling. “And, you know, frankly, you’re an asshole.”

“What?” R says. “If you don’t want me around, I won’t be here.”

“I mean, it’s not like you’ve been exactly a pleasure to hang out with lately, but—”

“Well, then, _let me go home_! If you don’t want me here, don’t make me stay here. You want me out, let me out.  In fact, fuck you, Ep; I don’t know where you—”

“R. R, listen,” Jehan says. They seem about to lay a hand on his, but think the better of it and put their palm back on the table, still, when Grantaire shoots them a look. He’s standing now, palms braced on the table. Eponine is breathing hard. “Listen to me. We always want you around us, no matter what. What we’re saying is that we’d much rather hang out with the functional version of you. And what you seem to be saying is that there is no version of you that we won’t need to, um, babysit. And why Eponine’s annoyed is… well, you kind of seem to be unconsciously choosing alcohol over hanging out with your friends with what you’re saying.”

R sucks on the inside of his cheek, glaring down at the table.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he says after a little while.

“Alright,” says Jehan. “What are you saying?”

It’s not a challenge, just an open forum, and their tone seems to get air down into Grantaire’s lungs again, cooling him.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Not that.”

There’s a long pause, no one looking at anyone else.

“I think it’ll be good for you to stay here for a little while and get some perspective,” Joly says.

“Perspective on _what?_ ” R asks.

Eponine huffs out a laugh.

“Your drinking,” Joly says.

He looks at their row of stony faces. Everybody looks ashen in the cold morning light through the kitchen windows, lips over teeth, bags under eyes, shoulders curled in under dirty sweaters. Jehan’s hair is half out of its braid, and Eponine has mascara smudged on her cheeks.

“Isn’t there that thing called ‘consent?’” Grantaire asks, once.

“There’s also something called ‘court-ordered rehabilitation,’” Bossuet says. “Hi, nice to meet you. We’re your jury of peers.”

“And you’re…” He looks around at them, helplessly. “I… I don’t know what to say right now.”

His skin is fizzing like he’s an Alka-Seltzer someone’s dropped into a glass of water, disintegrating under all these eyes. He can’t feel his fingers. Because they can’t be serious, right? Because this can’t be real, because he isn’t ready yet, because he doesn’t want this yet or maybe ever, because last night can’t have been the last time because… well, fuck, because it’s not like he’s never going to touch a drink again or something. That just isn’t a possibility. They’ll keep him here for a few days and then they’ll get sick of him and then he’ll be back at home watching Jeopardy and curling up around a mug of box wine in no time. For once, his forgettable-ness, his horrible personality—it’s all going to work in his favor. No one’s going to spend more than three days on him.

Thinking that, it’s like someone’s put a fishhook in his gut and pulled. He thinks again about the mug of box wine, about the warmth of it in his chest, in his belly—and it’s pain, pain, pain, almost like lust. Loneliness. Unquenchable, burning loneliness, so much that he wants to pull opne his own chest with his fingernails. No one wants him. No one. He wants a drink.

Three days. They won’t spend more than three days on him, and then he’ll be back to his room and to his box wine and things will be okay. Things will be sad but manageable, always manageable.

They’re still watching him. He probably looks like he’s nuts.

“I don’t know what’s…” he says. “What do you want from me?”

“We want you alive,” says Jehan, with their grey eyes big. They look so sincere that even Grantaire can’t summon the flippancy to laugh and say, “You alone.”

He says, “I _am_ alive.”

“R…” says Bossuet—and at that moment, footsteps arrive on the top step of the stairs to the apartment, and there’s a short knock at the door. Grantaire buries his face in his hands, rubbing at the bags under his eyes. He hears someone push back their chair and the soft murmurs of Combeferre’s hellos, shoes being slid off. He can feel the eyes, the eyes on the greasy part in his hair.

“R?” Ferre’s voice, close to his ear.

Grantaire lifts his eyes out of his hands and notes, for the first time, that his brain is throbbing, beating like a maraca against his skull. Fuck this shit.

“Hi, Ferre,” he says. In Combeferre’s eyes is a memory for R: a morning like this one, his stomach curling around nausea in a similar way, the light too bright, and his mom appearing at the door of Nicola Brisbank’s house, her lined face uncharacteristically soft—she’d realized no parents were home, she knew what they’d been up to the minute she saw the room and saw her daughter’s guilty face—seventh grade—and she never said it out loud, not all the drive home and not in the days following, even though he waited for it to come with a torture that was almost pleasurable. He knew she knew; why didn’t she yell? Why didn’t she lecture him about the dangers of underage drinking like his health teachers did? Why didn’t she call up Mrs. Brisbank and inform her as to what Nicola did while she was away?

“Hey, bud,” Combeferre says, and sits down in the wooden chair beside him. He’s wearing sweatpants and black plastic-bottomed slippers. Joly must have called him right out of bed. “How you feeling?”

“Worse now that you’re here,” says Grantaire, sardonically. “Why are you here?”

Ferre looks around at the room, eyebrows high. Bossuet grunts.

“The thanks I get. The thanks,” says Ferre. “What’s wrong with you? You wanna talk privately?”

R fidgets. He recognizes that he’s being an asshole, but he shakes his head anyway. He doesn’t want to talk at all, private or not.

“Alright, then.” Ferre sits back, rubs the nape of his neck. “You wanna tell me why I’m here?”

“Because Joly called you.”

“Why’d Joly call me?”

Grantaire glares. The world is covered in a thin, sparkly mist of surreality.

“Because I went a little bit overboard last night and now everybody’s flipping the fuck out for some reason.”

“R,” says Combeferre.

He doesn’t say anything for a while. He just looks at him until Grantaire looks away.

“You have a problem,” says Combeferre’s voice. It hits Grantaire’s cheeks and turns them bright, bright red. “And I know that you know that it’s a problem.”

“It’s not a problem. It’s—” The words shove themselves out of R’s mouth before he can stop them.

“It’s what?” says Combeferre. He’s so patient it hurts.

“It’s…” Grantaire pulls his hair. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I don’t know why… I don’t want this, Ferre. You guys. I just want to go home.”

He can hear his voice, its high registers: pathetic, girly, whining. He can feel the sweat under his armpits, the loose skin over his jowls, his unbound chest touching his belly under his sweatshirt. Please let me go home, he thinks. Please, please just let me go home and curl up in bed and never see any of you again.

“Sweetheart, we want to help you.” That’s Jehan. They’re leaning forward in their chair, stretching their open palms out across the table to him. R can’t refuse them anything. He takes one, and they fold the other over his hand. “We want you to get better.”

And R wants a drink and a nap. That’s what’s going to get him better right now.

He burrows his face into his elbow.

“Ferre,” says Joly’s voice, soft, “how much do you know about all this? I know you’re in the health field, but…”

“Not as much as I could. I took a class in drug use and addiction, but that was... three, four years ago. I’ve been mostly doing robots for a while now.”

Bossuet gives a little laugh. “You _do_ those robots, Ferre.”

“Okay,” says Joly. “That’s alright. I see a lot of this at the clinic, but haven’t gotten to the class yet, so hopefully we have the gaps filled in… If things get really bad, we’ll take him to the hospital.”

Grantaire’s too worn-out to even remind them of how fucked-up this all is, remind them that he’s still here.

“It won’t get that bad, right?” Eponine asks. “I mean, we’re doing the whole ‘cutting down’ thing, right?”

“It shouldn’t,” Joly says. “But it’s hard to say. Hopefully not.”

“Depends on how honest he is with us,” Combeferre says, nudging Grantaire’s foot with his. “R, buddy, we need you.”

Grantaire doesn’t lift his head. He just grunts into his elbow.

“You gotta answer some questions for us,” Ferre says. “You don’t have to look at us if you don’t want to.”

R doesn’t want to. He wants nothing. Like, literally nothing. The void. Black hole. Destroy his consciousness and send everyone off on their merry ways. The room is somersaulting around him, but he refuses to open his eyes.

“How many drinks would you say you have per day?” Joly’s voice asks.

For a minute or so, Grantaire hopes that by some miracle Joly will forget the question.

When it looks like this isn’t going to happen, he mumbles, “On average?”

“Give us the low end and high end for the past month or so,” says Joly.

Grantaire hums.

“Low end of maybe five,” he says. “High end… I don’t know. Last night, probably.”

“How long has it been since you’ve gone a day without drinking?” Combeferre’s voice. R thinks he might puke.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Two or three months.”

“How about two days without drinking?”

“I…” says R. He straightens up, finally, pulling his hand out of Jehans’, his head out of his arm. He’s looking down at the table as if it’s said something terrible to him. “I don’t know. A long time. Why?”

“We’re trying to gauge how quickly we can go with this,” Joly says. “Obviously, we’re not just going to cut you off cold-turkey, so we—”

“You’re not?” Grantaire turns beet-red at hearing the hopeful words come out of his own mouth, but he can’t deny to relief flooding through him.

“You’d die,” Eponine says.

A helpless laugh escapes Grantaire’s mouth. _Kill me_ , he thinks, but his body is overjoyed.

“I wouldn’t die,” he says. Eponine isn’t smiling.

“You might,” says Combeferre.

“It’s not that bad,” R says.

“It’s pretty bad,” says Joly. “I mean, um… Bossuet and I have been worried for a while now. We, uh, we were talking about a month ago. After one of the times we went to get brunch.”

Bossuet makes a soft sound of recognition.

“It was, ah…” he says. “I mean, it was Sunday morning at like ten a.m. and when you first showed up we thought you were just hungover, but then, like… Well, we kind of figured out that you’d definitely been drinking beforehand. And then we thought maybe you’d been up all night and Saturday night just hadn’t ended for you yet, and—”

“But then it kept happening,” Joly supplies. “So we realized it wasn’t just a fluke, and that’s _scary_ , R. That’s fucking scary. Ten a.m. on a Sunday is not a good time to be showing up visibly intoxicated every week.”

On some level, on some horrible little shelf inside of his ribcage where the worst parts of him live, Grantaire can feel his heart warm and glowing. Pleased. They know. They’ve seen him. They haven’t been oblivious all this time.

There’s another part of him, though, that’s like the canned laughter in the background of _Seinfeld_ when George Costanza says, “Pity is very underrated.” That’s the good part. The normal part. The part that knows he doesn’t deserve understanding.

What does that mean? What is he supposed to do? Crawl back to his little cockroach hole and continue toasting in the coming of a certain and graceless death? Go hang himself and settle his friends’ worries? Let them keep him here and have their way with him only to have them find that he’s a quieter but even less likeable person sober? When he’s sober, he’s whiny, miserable, purposeless. None of these options, in the end, look promising in terms of his survival. It just depends on how quick it goes.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks, quietly.

“Well,” says Combeferre, reaching across to take one of Grantaire’s hands. Grantaire moves to pull it away, but Ferre catches him by the wrist and lays two fingers across its soft inside. He counts off a few beats of the throbbing pulse there, watching Grantaire’s fingers shiver and twitch in the morning light. A lightning bolt—half embarrassment and half some kind of carnal, glorious comfort—shoots through R’s stomach at watching Combeferre watch his hands shaking.

“Joly, what kind of food do you have around right now?” Combeferre asks over his shoulder.

Joly thinks for a moment.

“Oo!” he says, then. “We have just the thing. Bossuet’s been making all these protein powder health smoothies lately…”

Grantaire groans.

“No, they’re really good, R!”

“They are,” Bossuet agrees, “if I do say so myself. Plus, I know what you like. I’ll just do fruits and no vegetables. Lots of blueberries.”

“That sounds perfect,” says Combeferre.

Grantaire grunts.

“Just don’t let Joly anywhere near it,” he says. “He tried to sneak kale into my sandwich while I wasn’t looking the other day.”

This, to Grantaire’s surprise, makes all of the company in the kitchen laugh. Even Combeferre snorts and tucks his head into his chest. Some of the dark tension coagulating in Grantaire’s muscles eases and, for the first time in nearly an hour, he feels he is amongst friends.

As Bossuet bustles around and the blender whirs, the bodies at the table shift into more comfortable positions, spreading out across the kitchen like dye dropped into a water droplet. Eponine taps at her phone, probably playing that puzzle game with the hexagons that she’s so addicted to. Jehan is standing, watching the birds in the alley through the window. Joly is emptying the dishwasher, inspecting the silverware as he does so. Combeferrre is looking at the table, ostensibly deep in thought until, after a while, he gets up and murmurs something in Joly’s ear. Joly straightens. They go off together into the hallway.

The liquid in the glass that Bossuet brings over is a frightening shade of beige. It looks like vomit with a pink straw sticking out of it, and Grantaire almost says so—but he figures he’s made enough trouble for one morning and instead takes a mock-enthusiastic slurp of the stuff.

It’s pretty damn delicious.

He frowns at Bossuet, and Bossuet laughs.

“I told you.”

“Alright, if this is what being a health nut’s like, I’m down.”

“You’ll stay, then?” says Joly, returning from the hallway with Combeferre at his shoulder.

Grantaire looks around at them. They’re watching. He takes another slurp of Bossuet’s smoothie. Was it ever in question that he wouldn’t stay, if they wanted him to, if he couldn’t convince them? Were there versions of him in their minds that would push them aside and storm out? Would they have let him go? Who are they, these Rs in his friends’ brains—what do they do? Punch Combeferre? Tread over Jehan? Would he, the real Grantaire, the one sitting here passively, looking back at all of them—would he ever do that?

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course. ’Long as Bossuet promises to make me more smoothies like this one.”

Bossuet beams.

“It gets better than that,” says Combeferre and, over Joly’s head, he holds up a bottle of Tanqueray gin.

There was a moment in which Grantaire had almost come close to forgetting. Now, as the goblin in his belly is gunned up again by the knowledge that something horrible is happening, something about separation, something where they’re going to _take this from him_ —but he can’t think like that; it’s not his; it’s just something; it’s nothing, nothing, to him that’s what they shouldn’t take it—but everything inside of his body reaches out and clutches for that green glass bottle, aching. He wants that gin so bad. So, so bad and right now.

It’s seven in the morning, and he’s still feeling a gentle, dying buzz, his stomach roiling, his head throbbing from pulling in and out of the blackouts last night, a few hours ago. Only a few hours. It doesn’t make sense. He shouldn’t want this much. He shouldn’t. It’s stupid. But, like—more than anything, he wants to take the bottle out of Combeferre’s hand and get all of its contents down his throat. And, while he tries very hard to keep this all off his face, it must read somehow—and maybe it reads more _because_ of his efforts—because he finds Eponine’s eyes on him, so clearly watching the cogs in his head turn that it almost makes him hate her.

“You, uh… Um. Oh. Okay. Smoothie?” says Grantaire, looking back and forth between it and the gin.

Combeferre’s eyebrow quirks.

“What?”

“You, uh… Should I finish the smoothie first?”

“Yeah,” says Combeferre, brushing past Joly into the room. Joly doesn’t seem to know quite where to go. “Finish the smoothie, and then we’ll talk about the rest.”

So he turns his attention to that, giving a sardonic toast to them all before he goes sucking away again at the hot pink straw.

“What’s in there, Bossuet?” asks Jehan, curious of the magical health smoothie that even Grantaire will drink, and Bossuet begins listing off the ingredients. The tension in the kitchen wanes again, pulling back, and Eponine pulls out her phone again. Ferre settles back against the counter, chewing on one of this sweatshirt strings as he listens to Bossuet and, for a moment, Grantaire can almost picture him as a kid. A sudden tenderness for his friend spreads up in his chest, an orange warmth. Ferre. Good old Combeferre, who’ll get out of bed at seven in the morning for this shit.

Grantaire finishes the smoothie before he realizes that he’s doing it.

He gets up, still only half-steady, and puts a hand on Jehan shoulder as he goes past to the sink. He’s rinsing out his glass when Joly takes it from him.

“Sit,” says Joly, who’s about half his size. His eyes are firm, though. Grantaire goes and sits, hearing Combeferre follow him, but refusing to look up until he sits down in the wooden chair beside him, out of fear of looking too eager.

He is eager.

He hates himself.

Combeferre has a shot glass that makes a soft _clink_ when he puts it down on the table. He has the bottle of gin, which he holds in his hands, between his knees.

God, everyone is watching.

“Right, R. On subsequent days, we’ll probably do this later, but Joly and I agree you’re probably gonna crash soon, and we wanna make that a little bit easier for you.”

He sounds like a fucking police officer.

“Were you supposed to go in to work today?” Combeferre asks.

Fuck, R thinks. Fuck. He’s supposed to go in to work today at four.

“No,” he lies. He can deal with it tomorrow.

“How about tomorrow?”

Can he really get away with missing two days from work? The answer is no. He probably can’t get away with missing just the one.

“Yeah,” he says. “I have work tomorrow.”

“Alright,” says Combeferre. And he starts unscrewing the cap from the gin. R wants to sag and sigh in relief. He just sits up straight. “Today we’re going to do five shots. One now, four later, interspersed throughout the day. We’ll take tomorrow as it comes.”

“That’s fine,” says Grantaire, but he really could be saying anything, for all he knows. Combeferre is pouring a healthy measure of gin into the shot glass, almost all the way up. The smell is up in the air, sharp and palpable.

When Ferre finishes pouring, he screws the cap back on and looks at Grantaire, who’s watching him like a fucking dog watching someone eat.

“Go ahead,” Ferre says, quietly, and R takes the shot, leaning down towards the table to meet his hand before it can spill. He tips his head back. His hair is greasy; his chin, pimply; the skin on his neck looks loose to the touch, somehow. Grantaire calls himself ugly more often than anyone has a right to and, however rarely, sometimes Combeferre can see it. It hurts to look at him right then.

When he puts the glass down, he’s R again, though, albeit tired and drawn and guilty-looking.

“Good job,” Combeferre hears himself say, and gets up to put the gin away.


End file.
